Stonehenge has a proud place in Britain's history as one of the wonders of the world and the best-known prehistoric monument in Europe.

But, according to a major new study, modern-day Britons are barely related to the ingenious Neolithic farmers who built the monument 5,000 years ago.

Instead the British are related to the 'Beaker people' who travelled from modern-day Holland and all but wiped out Stonehenge's creators.

The findings are 'absolutely sort of mind-blowing,' said archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, a professor emeritus at the University of Oxford.

'They are going to upset people, but that is part of the excitement of it.'

The genes of these ancient people provide enough clues to determine that Beakers travelled here from Holland and took over in a few centuries.

They replaced 90 per cent of the Neolithic farmers who built the monument and had lived here for 1,500 years.

The creators of Stonehenge appeared Mediterranean, with olive-hued skin, dark hair and eyes.

But the Beaker people were more like white modern British people, with fair skin, lighter hair and eyes.

The Beaker people may have killed off the ancient engineers behind Stonehenge by bringing the bubonic plague to Britain.

The Beakers were probably a peaceful people, with no evidence that they dispatched the Neolithic farmers by violent means.

Disease is the most likely reason for the Stonehenge creators' demise.

The research, published in the journal Nature, is the largest study of ancient human DNA ever conducted, by an international team of 144 archaeologists and geneticists.

Another associated study, also published in Nature, found that local-hunter gatherer people who originally lived on the steppes of Central Asia, north of the Black and Caspian seas, were replaced by nomadic herders, called the Yamnaya.

These people were able to expand rapidly by exploiting horses and the new invention of the cart, and they left behind big, rich burial sites.

Archaeologists have long known that some of the technologies used by the Yamnaya later spread to Europe, but the revelation from the ancient DNA was that the people moved too - all the way to the Atlantic coast of Europe in the west to Mongolia in the east and India in the south.

WHAT IS BELL BEAKER CULTURE? Between 4,700 and 4,400 years ago, a new bell-shaped pottery style spread across western and central Europe, and this period is called the 'Bell Beaker'.

The period received its name due to the pottery's distinctive bell-shaped beakers, decorated in horizontal zones by finely toothed stamps.

The decorated pots are almost ubiquitous across Europe, and could have been used as drinking vessels or ceremonious urns.

Believed to be originally from Spain, the Beaker folk soon spread into central and western Europe in their search for metals.

But the sheer variety of beaker artifacts across Europe has made the pottery difficult to define as coming from one distinctive culture.

A new study published in Nature suggests that the Beaker culture spread through Europe via two different mechanisms - the spread of ideas and migration.

I'm a Kermit fan myself, and I positively drool over Miss Piggy (cue Wolfie now adding bestiality to my list of deficiencies and crimes) but I've still given you one of those cabbage-coloured thingies.....